Eli5—Why is it that we all have different voices? I understand the idea of male and female, but I’m referring to tones. Vocal performance. Range. Etc.
In: Biology
Human evolution was guided in part by social pressures. Teamwork and social dynamics are some of our most important early survival strategies. Being able to make a wide range of vocalizations gave us more sophisticated communications. With large brains and incredible social comprehension we could easily understand oddities. A very deep voice in distress and a very sqeaky voice in distress wouldn’t be confusing to our early ancestors because they would have a strong understanding of the individuals in their group and would understand the sound of distress in more complex ways than simply pitch.
Broader vocal ranges could help survival way more than it could jeopardize it. So evolutionary pressures kept producing complex and less-than-perfectly standard vocal chords and vocal brain complexes until the system got so robust that it could support true language skills.
But it started with the strong social computing power in the brain.
A counter example would be songbirds. A lot of songbirds have a large list of chirps and calls that can signal different things. But if you gave those birds the vocal variance you see in humans you would cripple their ability to communicate. Their brains are good at handling a standardized array of communication, where as human brains could handle a very wide and nuanced band of communications.
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